Articulating Bodies
Subtitle: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9781789620757
Subjects: English fiction, history and criticism, 19th century
Description: Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-sie  cle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.